Cleverbot

About Cleverbot

The site Cleverbot.com started in 2006, but the AI was 'born' in 1988, when Rollo Carpenter saw how to make his machine learn. It has been learning ever since!

Things you say to Cleverbot today may influence what it says to others in future. The program chooses how to respond to you fuzzily, and contextually, the whole of your conversation being compared to the millions that have taken place before.

Many people say there is no bot - that it is connecting people together, live. The AI can seem human because it says things real people do say, but it is always software, imitating people.

Sign in to Cleverbot

You'll have seen scissors on Cleverbot. Using them you can share snippets of chats with friends on social networks. Now you can share snips at Cleverbot.com too!

When you sign in to Cleverbot on this blue bar, you can:

Tweak how the AI responds - 3 different ways!Keep a history of multiple conversationsSwitch between conversationsReturn to a conversation on any machinePublish snippets - snips! - for the world to seeFind and follow friendsBe followed yourself!Rate snips, and see the funniest of themReply to snips posted by othersVote on replies, from awful to great!Choose not to show the scissors

TURING TEST: The bots are not amused

Press Release June 11th, 2014 - for immediate release

Bots cannot really be amused... but they can certainly be amusing!

Not all bots are built the same. Cleverbot is not scripted like Eugene Goostman, Siri or Cortana, but learns its content, in endless variety, from the public. People talk, argue, roleplay and flirt with it for hours - around 20 million people have in the last year. Cleverbot uses deep context within 180 million lines of conversation, in many languages, and that data is growing by a million a week.

Says its creator, Rollo Carpenter "The popularity of Cleverbot helps to answer those who have questioned the value of any such 'bot'. It is a real entertainment for millions of people, and occupies more leisure time than many a traditional media production."

Referring to the recent claimed Turing Test pass, Carpenter says "There's more than one kind of Turing Test, and any number of interpretations are possible, but we at Existor have to join Ray Kurzweil and others in declaring the Turing Test still open for business. A 30% pass mark is simply too low, and two conversations per 5 minutes made them overly short."

In 2011 Carpenter made no categoric claim for a Turing Test pass when Cleverbot achieved 59% compared to humans' 63%. Previously Cleverbot had achieved 42% at an AI conference in Cambridge. Both were unrestricted tests.

Cleverbot will continue to grow its 'collective intelligence', faster than any team of developers could script. New features include personalising the way the AI responds, and a gamified Turing Test app has been launched. The software has been re-engineered to use parallel processing, and, says Carpenter "The team has big plans for a future, massively more semantic Cleverbot 2.0. The AI in the movie 'Her' may be closer than you think, with Turing's Test or without."

Some statistics

According to Google Analytics, 16.6 million people have used Cleverbot.com in the last year, in 27.3 million sessions, totalling 1.02 billion interactions. Add in sister site Existor.com, with an avatar, that has seen 2.9 million users in 4.3 million sessions, and 99 million interactions. Then add 2.9 million app sessions. So 20 million users is if anything understated.

1.1 billion interactions at 30 seconds each (the average) is 9.2 million man-hours of usage.

Example conversations

Cleverbot: Do you know what a Turing Test is?

User: No.

Cleverbot: A test given to AI, such as yourself, determining whether or not they can uphold a human conversation.

User: What is AI?

Cleverbot: Artificial intelligence. That's what you are.

User: No, I'm a human.

Cleverbot: But you're not a human. You're a computer.

User: No, I was joking with you to find out if it was a real person...